In BizTalk (2016) "Syntax Version 4" is supposed to give you 8 digit date format in UNB1.2 but it doesn't seem to work?

Question

I have a trading partner that expect us to send the EDIFACT message according to Syntax Version 4 and that version states that UNB:S004:0017 should be 'n8' but setting the the syntax version to '4' in the trading partner agreement doesn't change that, it always comes out as an n6.

UNB:S004:0017 is the date of preparation, eg. the date (and time in 0019) of the creation of this file.

I transform an inhouse XML to EDIFACT IFTMIN D10B and the transform does what it should but the EDIFACTSend pipeline doesn't add the proper envelope to the native EDIFACT output.

This is the output I get:

UNB+UNOE:4+SENDER_ID:ZZZ+RECEIVER-ID+221114:1136+23'

This is the output I would expect:

UNB+UNOE:4+SENDER_ID:ZZZ+RECEIVER-ID+20221114:1136+23'

The:4 after UNOE says that it is syntax version 4 but the output doesn't adhere to that.

Anyone have a clue what I'm missing? Or is this a bug?

EDIT : We are running Feature Pack 3 with CU6 in all environments and we have the same problem everywhere. The current solution is to handle this with regex in a custom pipeline component, in a custom pipeline. This works, for now, but maybe there is a fix for this in a later CU? Or in BizTalk 2020?

Answer 1

I ended up creating a custom pipeline component and pipeline that uses regex to find the date and, if syntax version 4 is specified, replace the n6 date with an n8 dito.